FormGen

» see formgen.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The name came off a product nobody now remembers. FormGen Corporation was founded in 1987 in Bolton, Ontario by two friends, Randy MacLean and Robert Van Rycke, to sell a text-based form generation program through Radio Shack stores in Canada. Van Rycke left in October 1988. Within five years the business had drifted a long way from printing invoices and was the publisher of record for some of the most violent entertainment software on sale in North America, under a name that still described office stationery.

What changed it was an agreement with id Software. FormGen distributed Commander Keen in Aliens Ate My Babysitter and then Wolfenstein 3D: Spear of Destiny. The shareware Doom went out through it too. It picked up Apogee Software as well, which brought Rise of the Triad and, at the start of 1996, Duke Nukem 3D.

The company moved as the money moved. It was in North Andover, Massachusetts, took a nine-thousand-square-foot unit at the Scottsdale Airpark in Arizona in November 1993, had outgrown that by October 1995 and went to twenty-five thousand square feet nearby. Its website opened in April 1996 to serve news and shareware downloads, which was three months before it was sold.

James Perkins was running it as president by then, and he was a founding member of the Shareware Industry Association, which places the business accurately. FormGen was not a studio and never made a game. It was the channel: the part of the operation that got a disk into a shop and then took the phone order for the rest of the episodes.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the shareware channel ~

The mechanism deserves stating plainly because nothing works this way now. Episode one went out free and spread on its own, across bulletin boards and hand to hand, and the remaining episodes cost money and arrived in the post or off a shelf. FormGen's whole job was the second half.

That machinery was North American by construction. A free first episode only functions as a sales funnel where there is a number to call and an address to ship to, and the arrangement never reached Turkey. The games turned up here whole, on discs with every episode already on them, detached from the business model that had paid for them. Duke Nukem 3D was something you had; the shareware channel was something that happened somewhere else.

~ the levels case ~

The company's name outlasted its independence by two years because it was in litigation. Micro Star had packaged user-made Duke Nukem 3D levels as a retail product called Nuke It and printed screenshots from them on the box. FormGen sued.

Micro Star v. FormGen Inc. was argued on 4 November 1997 and decided on 11 September 1998, with Alex Kozinski writing for the Ninth Circuit. The question was whether a map file built by a player is a derivative work of the game it runs inside. The court held that it was, narrowing an earlier test down to two requirements, and produced the line the case gets quoted for: the levels "are surely sequels, telling new tales of Duke's fabulous adventures".

The Ninth Circuit reversed the district court's refusal to enjoin distribution of Nuke It, and upheld the injunction already standing against the box art. GT Interactive, the parent by then, said the commercial exploitation of player-created levels was a clear violation of the Duke Nukem 3D copyright. Later arguments about mods and user-made content keep running back through 154 F.3d 1107, which is docketed under the name of a company that started out printing forms in Ontario.

~ one million shares ~

The sale is dated to the day by the press release: Business Wire, New York, 1 July 1996, announcing that GT Interactive Software Corp. had acquired FormGen Corporation in a pooling of interests, exchanging approximately one million shares of common stock for all the outstanding shares. Ron Chaimowitz, GT's chief executive, said the attraction was the 3-D action games plus "extensive experience in the growing shareware publishing category". It was GT's second purchase inside a fortnight, after roughly 2.3 million shares for the WizardWorks Group the week before. Shadow Warrior, unreleased and listed in that release as a FormGen title, shipped on 13 May 1997 with GT Interactive's name on it instead. By 4 March 2000 formgen.com was advertising itself for sale, with an email address at dmr800.com for anyone who wanted the name.

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